If the CIA and NSA (let alone Russian and Chinese intelligence) are illegally spying on you, your civilian phone is toast. You shouldn't be ordering DoorDash on the thing.
Imagine the resources the Chinese and Russian governments devote to accessing these phones. The value to them could be trillions of dollars and/or existential differences in national security outcomes. The owners have to assume they are hacked, and that China and Russia know where they are going to dinner (which itself is a problem - they know who is meeting with who and when).
"it's possible that the current admin working groups don't trust the official secure channels and assume they are compromised and they are being spied upon by their own or foreign agencies"
Jesus Christ, this is dumb. Using a civilian app with civilian phones is literally the best way to get spied on, by either "your own" or foreign agencies. These people are going to get us all killed in a nuclear first strike.
> These people are going to get us all killed in a nuclear first strike.
Not sure how leaking state secrets is risking nuclear annihilation - unless they invite Putin or Xi mistakenly in their Signal Group and plan to bomb Moscow or Beijing but the coziness of the current administration with these 2 countries is certainly not making this scenario realistic at all.
Instead the reality is likely more boring: they just accelerate American decline
Don’t kid yourself that coziness makes anyone safe. We’re always one radar fluke away from a mistaken launch. And the more confident any adversary is that they can eliminate leadership, the higher the probability something terrible happens.
Please don’t reassure yourself by thinking that putting total incompetents in power is making anyone safer.
Everything was patent encumbered to some extent, it was just a question of how you read the patents. I worked at AT&T Labs in the early days (they were also some of the inventors) and I remember being invited to Sony Music studios in Japan around 1999/2000, where the head of their studio business let us do a “dance off” between AAC and the proprietary Sony ATRAC3 codec at similar bitrates. Using AAC was a pretty obvious win vs. most of the alternatives out there around the time iTunes launched.
There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t. To settle this, you basically need to look at what China is doing —- which is to build a lot of nuclear and then exponentially more solar and wind. We’re a huge percentage of the way down the slide to a mostly renewable world with storage, and some nuclear at the edges.
I don't get all that either, though I don't mind if nuclear is the future we'd just need to let go of the brakes on it. The other thing to look at is overall growth of each type - China is going ham on wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear yet they've still had to increase the total amount of power generated by coal, oil, and gas anyways. Graphs always predict something like https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2017.09.27/main.png but we really always end up with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ch...
Whatever the cheapest (clean) option deployable is people should be wanting to throw it in as fast as we can until we actually hit a technology limit with its usability instead of worrying it won't be able to get us to 100% or not. Instead, the conversation tends to read like we've already succeeded in deploying clean energy fast enough and we should stop looking or that we are still looking for a technology which can cut our current emissions and waiting for an answer. Neither are true, we're still burning more fossil fuels during the day. The US at least managed to hit break even growth in electricity generation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/US_Elect... even after stalling nuclear outputs but there's still a lot to go there all the same. I'm not as familiar with Europe.
About the only stances I've been able to make sense of (even though I don't personally agree with them) are the concern nuclear is a step back rather than a step forward and that's why we shouldn't deploy it and the people that just want the cheapest power regardless of source. Everyone else doesn't seem to have a reason to worry about "what" as much as "how to deploy more" for the moment. The dirtier power tends to be the one that's easier to spin up/down very rapidly anyways - "keep the capacity for now and just run it less when you can" is still a great thing.
I'm not sure what you're arguing that's different than what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that renewables are being deployed on an exponential (S-)curve and nuclear is not. Given the relatively short time frame we have to solve this issue, any viable solution must exhibit this exponential deployment increase.
(This does not mean we'll succeed. Maybe we're all doomed anyway. But any approach that doesn't have this shape is a disaster.)
If you actually care about this problem, the actual question is: how do we get nuclear onto that same exponential pathway that renewables are on? Fiddling around with our existing legacy nuclear plants is so inadequate to our emissions pathways right now that it's equivalent to surrender.
> There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t.
"Exponentially more" means literally nothing. 1 is also an exponent.
China is building literally everything. It's also a geographically diverse country, with wide ranges of different climates. Solar is appropriate for Hainan, but makes little sense for Harbin.
You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at 90-95% capacity factors.
And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.
Even considering the capacity factor solar and wind still grows by 60x compared to nuclear. And storage is no longer an „unsolved problem“. You could manage the current grid with current chemical battery technology, levelized cost of electricity of that solution is cheaper than nuclear. And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
The real tricky thing will be stuff like chemical processes that depend on hydrocarbons, but nuclear is no help for that.
Nuclear didn’t deliver on an every revolution in the 50s and it won’t today. It’s nice for submarines and to have an industrial base to build bombs but it inherently can’t solve the world’s energy demands.
Yes, it is an unsolved problem. Even adding 8h backup battery puts solar on par with nuclear: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf (nuclear's capital costs are around $4000/kW).
And seasonal storage (enough energy to last for 2-3 weeks without sun/wind) does not even have a price tag, because it simply doesn't exist.
> And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
Nope. Renewables have comprehensively failed in providing a viable replacement for nuclear power. There is no reasonable pathway ahead with the current technologies for renewables to replace the reliable baseline generation.
It doesn't mean that solar/wind are useless, they work great in cases where the load can be shed, and in warm climates where electricity demand is not so critical.
I replaced all the three way switches in my (100+ year old) home and found loads of ugly cloth-covered wiring and even “knob and tube” in a few places. So this was a great exercise. Unfortunately I miswired one circuit so badly that my metal chandelier became a live electrical death trap, which I only found out during the inspection when we sold the place. I cannot recommend professional electricians enough.
Is it actually cheaper to power this with nuclear plants (especially micro-reactors that don't really exist in production) than just deploying a lot of wind/solar/batteries to do it?
We don't know because nobody is mass building any nuclear reactors right now (micro or traditional - it's one of the main reasons there's so many cost overruns with anything being built right now). There's also no mass scale example of renewable desalination, either. It's almost all bespoke, so it's mostly theoretical.
If climate change continues and water becomes something to fight over like oil was in the 20th century, then we may finally see traction on both fronts.
But there are pretty large-scale deployments of renewables and battery storage going on, so presumably some fraction of the power used in today’s desalinization plants is generated from renewables (at least in China.) At very least there should be no deep mysteries about the generation costs.
Sure, but desalination is very power hungry. In Oman they managed to get a desalination plant to be 1/3 directly covered by solar in the desert and they still need alternative power for when that 1/3 is unavailable. Battery costs are still high. If it was that easy, it would be done.
What’s technically more achievable: adapting desalinization so it can work efficiently on intermittent power, reducing battery costs, or getting SMRs up and widely deployed along the Mexican coast in the next decade? I don’t have any idea if the answer to this but I don’t think they’re all equally pie in the sky either.
In theory, SMRs - *if* they're built out at scale (meaning for many other uses). The problem is the first users are going to pay a premium and it likely won't happen until they're already scaled out (and may still have to compete with renewable subsidies).
Renewables should still be competitive in certain cases, though.
Someone makes concrete allegations of massive fraud and then uses those allegations as justification for huge funding cuts. Folks ask for evidence of the fraud justifying these cuts. They are instead given evidence of the existence of some different fraud that occurred some point in the past.
If you don't see how problematic that is, then why not just avoid the discussion in the first place?
> uses those allegations as justification for huge funding cuts
I am personally not calling for that. What I do want is for the flow of money to this network of DC-based NGOs to get cleaned up.
Have you ever heard of a grant "poem"? That's an inside term for the fancy language that is written when an NGO or university requests funding from a US federal agency. It has to sound quasi-legitimate, even erudite. But the purpose is to secure more money, and for NGOs, the actual funds are almost entirely used to enrich the people in the NGO, and often to fund things that keep the left in power (like local protests, far-left media, "grassroots" left-wing campaign organizations, etc). Grant poems to enrich NGOs constitute fraud -- maybe not in an accounting sense, but it very much is a defrauding of the citizens who pay taxes.
Also, DOGE has so far found 14 "magic money" computers located in various agencies, including the department of the treasury. When a particular API call comes in, these computers will transfer money from nothing, essentially creating new money out of thin air. That is the worst form of fraud.
> If you don't see how problematic that is, then why not just avoid the discussion in the first place?
Because the faithlessness of the federal bureaucracy and its network of NGOs, combined with its sheer magnitude and entrenched power, is a very real problem. I guess I'm not articulate enough to engage productively with folks like yourself who inexplicably seem to think it's really great...
Modern democratic governments ought to implement the will of the people, not subvert it to enrich themselves and stay in power. Do you disagree?
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In summary, Trump will be gone in 4 years, Elon Musk is rapidly losing his money and influence. The wheel of fortune turns rapidly for elected officials and their administrations. But by default, these lifetime Washington DC residents (and their WEF allies) who exert enormous power over the populace will only be more rich and powerful with each passing election season. They hate the USA and those who love it, precisely because the freedoms and stipulations of the Constitution, and the hardy "free settlers of the frontier" ethos, threaten their power.
(I don't mean every, or even most of the residents of DC. I mean those who are the most personally enriched and who wield the most political power without being elected or appointed by someone who is elected. Most of these people are in the vast NGO network.)
It can also produce a creepy feeling if you’ve had past bad experiences with similar people. My pet theory is that this is why so many polarizing figures are able to get equal numbers of devoted followers and also people who despise them: it’s almost like a disease that produces a population that has “immunity.”
They are both situations in which a University was politically pressured by the government to revoke degrees for political purposes. The difference is just the specific goals of the government doing the pressuring. You don’t think Columbia just coincidentally decided to take this action months after the fact, after having its funding pulled by the US administration, do you?
I don't agree with politically pressuring organizations but it could just as easily be politically motivated to not enforce established rules on criminal behaviour.
This is honestly something very strange to me, because a bunch of academics are the furthest thing on Earth from the police. Why can't vandals have a normal day in court and go to regular jail?
I don’t think you understand how long it takes for universities to decide how to handle punishment situations.
This one has a significant complication of parallel legal action. They seized and vandalized a building. They’ve been reviewing evidence and building cases for a long time.
If you’re operating an honest judicial board and you’re receiving high profile threats from the US government backed by huge funding cuts to the University, you have a choice. (1) Comply or simply appear to comply, by rendering a favorable ruling immediately, (2) Establish that your ruling is not the result of government pressure. You’d do the latter by (for example) showing your work and proving that the results were already determined before the pressure campaign began; or you’d change the timing so that it doesn’t look like cause and effect; you could even suspend your ruling on the grounds that maintaining the appearance of the University and Board’s independence is a higher priority than punishing a few protestors.
Columbia did none of the things in category (2). I know it’s 2025 and we have to pretend that this apparently corrupt thing is innocent, even while the folks involved make no effort to defend it. But it isn’t innocent, and everyone involved knows what’s going on.
There is no point in giving into threats if the other party is still going to follow through regardless. I think the best argument against this being due to political pressure from trump is it doesn't seem effective in getting rid of that pressure. If trump is the thing they care about here, why would they bother if trump is going to do trump things regardless.
I don't know what "reverse course" means here. This is extortion, not a simple transaction like purchasing a sandwich in a deli.
The Trump administration is withholding funding and simultaneously making a series of explicit (and completely inappropriate) demands that it wishes Columbia to comply with. I assume what we're watching is a kind of "negotiation" period in which Columbia either does or does not do various things, and then over time the Trump administration decides whether to relent or punish them further. There is no real pressure on the administration to just stop.
One of the explicit demands the administration made was for Columbia to disband the University Judicial Board (the exact group that handed down these decisions) presumably because they felt that it would not sufficiently punish the protesters. Coincidentally, around the same time this happened, the board "independently" decided to punish the protesters quite severely.
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